Geekly Update - 28 Mar 2011

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

After years of hassling with opposition, ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has finally approved the .XXX for usage in pornographic websites. Oh by the way, ICANN, you should close that barn door over there... I see horses all over the place.

Mozilla has released FireFox 4.0 for download on PC, Mac and Linux, soon to be available in over 80 languages. It promises faster speed and streamlined interface, and the company claims that they hit 1 million downloads in 3 hrs. Let's see... 1,000,000 at $0.00 each...

AT&T has purchased T-Mobile USA for a whopping $39 billion in cash and stock from Deutsche Telekom. The two companies will remain independent for now, so there will be no iPhone from T-Mobile any time soon.

RIM announced that its new Playbook will debut April 19 and is available for pre-order with a price of $499. The 7-inch tablet features a multitouch display, a dual core, 1 GHz Cortex A9 microprocessor, 1GB RAM and runs on QNX mobile OS. My sales prediction? See Zune.

Marketing research company HIS iSuppli, has determined that the recent disaster in Japan may affect iPad 2 production. They found that several components would be tough to replace elsewhere, such as an electronic compass, battery and the display glass.

Facebook has acquired Snaptu, an Israeli company that makes Java-based mobile phone apps. The $70 million acquisition came after the company helped them build a free feature phone app that can work on about 2,500 devices.

At the recent CTIA Wireless, Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse unveiled the new HTC Evo 3D, the first 4G device that provides 3D without glasses. He also introduced the HTC Evo View 4G tablet that runs on Gingerbread and features a 7" display.

Wizcom Technologies, mostly known for its portable scanning pens, has come out with a new pocket-sized scanner that includes a dictionary. The aptly named Quicktionary TS Premium can scan and transfer text to a PC and is available at a starting price of $300.00.

Bill Nguyen, originator of Lala and 6 other startups has a new one that he thinks will rival Facebook. Color is a free smartphone based app that allows users to share videos, images and text with multiple phones in real time.

Falling behind Google and Bing, Yahoo has decided to provide "instant" search engine results like the others. The Search Direct feature, now almost ho hum to Googlers, is currently in beta and includes an expanded query box. Yahoo... I remember that one. It was cool in 1998, I think.